


Abecedarian

by Syntax



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Asexual Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Don't worry he gets better, Elder Scrolls Lore, Experimental Style, Fate & Destiny, Game Mechanics Given In-Universe Justification, Gen, Gender-Neutral Dragonborn, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Human Sacrifice, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Introspection, Mental Breakdown, Other, Religious Cults, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2020-12-28 20:21:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21142628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syntax/pseuds/Syntax
Summary: There is a name on his wrist, as there is a name on everyone's wrist.The name on his wrist is white, which is not unusual.  The name on his wrist is short, which is also not unusual.  The name on his wrist is unreadable, which is very unusual indeed.He is born on an average spring day in an average village in an average region, and in hope for the fate that his name has thrust upon him, his parents decide to call him Miraak.





	Abecedarian

**Author's Note:**

> so according to my discord records, i've had this idea bouncing around in my head since *checks archives* november 30th of last year. the actual writing of this fic took roughly 2-3 weeks.
> 
> enjoy.

When he is born, it is on a day that has no business being as important as it is.

There are no omens in the sky. There is no grand change in the weather. There is only blue sky, and a smattering of clouds, and the chill of the sea wind, and the sweet scent of spring.

There is a name on his wrist, as there is a name on everyone's wrist.

(Well, almost everyone, for he had a great uncle named Zinvahriin, who had neither a name nor a longing for one, and seemed all the happier for it.)

The name on his wrist is white, which is not unusual. He was born before the one who would bear his name on their wrist, and when they were born his name would fill in with color as black as the night sky.

The name on his wrist is short, which is also not unusual. Indeed, many of the people in his home village have short names, for they are simple folk with small families, and have no need for a great lineage to tack onto their names.

The name on his wrist is unreadable, which is very unusual indeed. His family is not very well lettered, not in the same sense that the great dragon priests would be, but they know the shape of their own alphabet, and they know the words that the traders write with. This was something else. Something strange. Something foreign. Something heretical, maybe?

What a horrible thought. What a horrible child then, to be fated to bring someone so strange into their home.

Or. Perhaps not horrible?

There are stories in every village around them, of outsiders who heard the truth of their ways, their worship, their gods, and decided to join them. Friends of villagers. Lovers of villagers.

Soulmates of villagers.

That, perhaps, could be beared. A child not weak enough to lead a heretic into their midst, but a child strong enough to civilize one.

Lead them. Teach them. Change them.

Guide them into the allegiance of dragons.

He is born on an average spring day in an average village in an average region, and in hope for the fate that his name has thrust upon him, his parents decide to call him Miraak.

When he is six years old, it is on an humid summer day that he is taken from his parents.

The sun is oppressive in the sky, a fitting description for the heavenly body so closely linked to their oppressive gods. He does not mind the heat, for he is a child, and children are not as easily fazed by these things as adults are.

Today is a very special day. Today is the day that the raiding parties have brought back heretics from far away lands, to march them in a grand procession and offer them up as sacrifices to the dragon gods. Today is the Dragon Feast.

Today is, perhaps, the day that he will meet his soulmate.

His parents have already told him about the name on his wrist, what it means, what they _think_ it means, and what his name means in turn.

He has been rubbing his wrist all morning trying to see if the strange white characters will darken in color. He is young enough to not fully understand what being born entails, and the idea that he might meet his soulmate in the procession of heretics does not seem strange to him.

His parents lead him to the crowd of villagers with a muted excitement on their faces; nothing compared to what graces his own gap-toothed face. They ask him, amused, where all the enthusiasm is coming from. He tells them. The amusement fades from their faces, but they do not explain why. They only tell him to remain close.

And he does.

For a time, at least.

He has been rubbing his wrist all morning trying to see if the strange white characters will darken in color. And unbeknownst to him, the constant rubbing has worn the dye of his new shirt off on his skin. It is the entire wrist, not only the name in white, that is stained with the beginning of a deep blue-black color, but he is a child, and he does not know these things, and his eyes widen with wonder upon seeing the name change color in the way that only a child's can.

It is a sign, he decides then and there, hand already slipping from his mother's as he stares at the blue-dyed name. His soulmate has been born.

And they are here, waiting to meet him.

He vanishes into the crowd in the hopes of meeting them first.

Even if he were to understand that it is not possible for his soulmate to be born at that exact moment and still be able to speak with him and play with him and love him as his mother and father love each other (whatever sort of love that might be), he is young enough that such logic would not deter him. Children have their own logic that the minds of adults cannot always parse.

His soulmate is an outlander are they not? A heretic are they not? He's heard stories of outlanders and heretics that his parents have told him to make him behave, stories of their strange rituals and strange magic and strange powers. It would not seem unfeasible to him that a heretic born the same day he will meet them would appear to be a child the same age as he.

It is these thoughts that drive him further and further through the crowd of gathered villagers, further and further away from his parents. Though the faces in the crowd are all ones he recognizes, he is small enough that they do not notice him as he passes, and thus he escapes being found and returned to his parents.

It is for this reason and this reason only that he is ever able to get so close to the dragons and discover his heritage.

He reaches, after a good deal of walking and squeezing and shouting 'excuse me', for his parents taught him manners far sooner than they taught him sense, the point of the crowd nearest to the ceremonial dais that all of the prisoners will be lead to and offered up as food to the great dragons that were their gods. He sticks his head through the massive throng of people.

And he watches.

They come slowly at first. He is at the very end of their journey, and those that are doomed to die have a long way to go before they reach the dais. The people—_his_ people, the people of the dragon cult, not the people that will be killed for the dragons' favor—begin to yell at the procession of heretics.

Jeer at them. Curse them. Throw things at them. Desecrate them, literally and symbolically, in the hopes that their transgressions will be passed on to the group of despairing and dirty people walking towards the dais, doomed to die for the sheer sin of not being a part of the cult that is killing them, and that perhaps when they die their borrowed sins will die as well, and their captors will become clean.

He jeers with the crowd, naturally. He is a child. He does not know what is being done, only that everyone he knows it doing it, and that must make it proper to follow along.

The people are lead one by one to the dais.

They are fed one by one to the dragons.

If the sins of the crowd vanish down the dragons' bellies as surely as the flesh of the sacrifices do, none in the crowd will ever be able to tell.

He watches the dragons feast, the smell of blood and misery and human filth heavy in the air and the cries of the heretics drowned out by the cries of the crowd. He is frightened of the power and cruelty of the dragons, surely, but he does not look away. He still needs to see which of the heretics is his soulmate after all. It is only when the last human life is extinguished on the dais that his gaze turns back downward to the lying name on his wrist.

It is only because his gaze is turned that he does not realize what happens in the air above the dais until it has already passed.

He hears the roar of dragons bickering, but assumes it is only the roar of dragons communicating.

He hears the crunch of dragon's teeth on bones, but assumes it is only the crunch of the dying sacrifices.

He hears the sound of a large body falling lifeless to the ground, but assumes it is only the sound of a dragon landing.

He feels a rush of strange energy filling his body as the dragon's soul is absorbed, and he has no idea what on earth that must be. So he looks up from the dyed skin of his wrist to see what might have happened.

And finds everyone staring at him as if he had just done something impossible.

When he is taken away, he is told to forget his family.

They find out about his dragon soul swiftly. They find out about his heretic soulmate swifter still. The priests agree with his parents' logic of bringing their faith to his soulmate, and decide that this strange heretic must be someone of great importance to be destined for a god in mortal flesh. He, however, is more important still.

He cannot mingle with the common people anymore as if he were one of them. He must be trained. Educated. If he is a dragon in human form, then he must hone himself to be the best that humanity has to offer, so that he may stand on level ground with his fellow dragons.

So forget your family, they tell him. They may have brought you into this world, but they are not your true kin. Let the thought of them trouble you no more.

It will take him many years, but eventually he does.

When he is a youth on the cusp of puberty—for the elder priests in the dragon cult do not care for such things as birthdays and celebrations, and even if they did his parents had never told him when his was before he was taken from them—he begins learning the dragon's tongue.

His past years in the temple among the priests that had taken him from his family were spent learning as many subjects as they felt he would need to know. Arithmetic, history, rhetoric, how to read and write in the common tongue of the people. Now he will learn to read, to write, and to Speak in the language of the gods.

His progress is slow going. The best time to teach is when the mind is young and easily malleable; he is younger than the other initiates and pupils housed in the temple, surely, but he is not as young as he once was. He learns new words in the common tongue while he studies the dragon tongue: accusative, dative, genitive, nominative.

His studies are difficult. He appears to have some strange intrinsic knowledge of the dragon language, no doubt gifted to him by his dragon soul, but this knowledge is spotty and fractured at best. He can say with confidence that the word "hin" becomes "him" when referring to words that start with an "h" sound, but he cannot say why, or what case "him/hin" is in.

The lack of knowledge frustrates him. He takes to studying in his off hours, forming the Words with his mouth and trying to better understand them.

Inevitably while he studies, his thoughts wander to other words that he does not understand.

The name on his wrist is white. The same as it was when he discovered his dragon soul that fateful day, the same as it was when he had been born.

He does not know how old he is now. He is certain it has to be more than ten years, but he can't be certain of how many more. How long must he wait until his soulmate will join him in this world? Will he be a shriveled old man by the time that the heretic's name turns black? How long is his lifespan, truly, if he has the body of a mortal man but the soul of an immortal god?

He does not know. There is perhaps some part of him that wishes not to know, for ignorance is as much a form of bliss as it is a form of torture, but his soul is that of a dragon's and he is greedy by nature. He must know. He has to know.

If he cannot determine the secrets of the name on his wrist, then the determining the secrets of the dragon tongue will have to suffice for now.

A new initiate arrives at the temple one day and he dislikes them immediately.

They are not from the region of Solstheim, but further to the west, in a place they call Eastmarch. Their words are strange and their customs are stranger, but they follow the dragon cult as all civilized men do, and so he will not begrudge them for such oddities. But they come from a region where only priests bear names in the dragon tongue, and have seen fit to do nothing but deride him for being so presumptuous as to carry a priest's name at such a young age when he is clearly not priest material.

The thought had never struck him to become a dragon priest before this initiate arrived at the temple, but now he wants viciously to become the greatest priest the races of man have ever produced if only to spite them.

So he studies harder. Practices more. The words do not come easy, but he is beginning to grow better at translating, better at composing, better at remembering. The initiate still pesters him and his priestly name, and like the child he is he rises to the bait every time. Much as he despises the initiate, much as he would love to rule over them as a dragon should, they are older than he is, and their body is stronger than his. The failings of his mortal flesh have left him at their mercy physically, and so it is only his rhetoric that he has left to defend himself with.

He is not as good with rhetoric as he thinks he is.

He's told them before, perhaps countless times, perhaps twenty times, which is still entirely too many times for a subject to be broached when one has only been in the area for a few months at the most, of the custom his village had had of giving everyone a name in the dragon's tongue to be closer to their gods, of the reason behind his name specifically, of—and this was perhaps saying too much, but he was angry at the time and the words simply came tumbling out—his errant soulmate and the fate they have afforded him.

When he says these words, he is stricken more deeply than he expected to be to find them met not with sudden understanding and a willingness to make amends, but with a jeering smile and an insult to the one whose name he bears. God or not he is still only a child who has lived most of his life without true adversity, and is unused to the idea that some people do not care what you do or say because they have already made up their minds to dislike and demean you.

He has lost his temper before. He has raged and roared before. He is a child before he is a man, before he is a dragon, before he is anything, and children feel things much more strongly than men do. But he has never felt his blood boil so hotly, nor his jaw clench so tightly, nor his heart burn so fiercely.

He says—

He does not remember what he says.

Ultimately, it does not matter what he says. Because what he says to the initiate, in their last day at the temple before transferring out in a hurry, he does not truly say.

He Shouts.

When word of his newfound ability reaches the elder priests of the temple, they meet in silence where they think he cannot hear, and discuss the possibility that he might become too powerful to contain. None but the dragons have ever harnessed the power of the Thu'um. None had ever thought it to be possible. He burns at the thought of any mortal man controlling him, but he is well enough aware of his limitations now to know that were the priests to turn against him as the child he is now, he would not survive.

He burns, but he resolves not to let them destroy him before he can achieve his name-bound fate.

When the priests come to him and ask him to repeat his Shout, he fails. Or at the very least, he makes a convincing show of failing. It takes many trials over many days and weeks before the priests are satisfied that his spontaneous use of the Thu'um was just that. They leave him to his studies once more, certain that they have nothing to fear now.

He continues to study the dragon language for hours upon hours. If he wishes to practice his diction, he goes to the courtyard and speaks where all can hear him.

He practices his Thu'um in the woods.

When he is perhaps fourteen years of age, he begins to resent the name written on his skin.

He does not know how old he is, but with the passing of one of the priests at the temple—one of those who had taken him from his family, though he does not begrudge them for such a thing anymore—he has become more and more aware of the mortality of men. He does not know if he is truly mortal, if his body will simply stop aging one day and he shall spend eternity with his fellow dragons, or if he will grow old and die like all of the other men who have come before him.

Love is an infinite thing, but the ability to enjoy it thoroughly can surely only last as long as his own body is able to support him.

How much time will he have with his soulmate before his life is over? How much time will they have with him? Will he be damned to spend his twilight years in the company of a babe who will never remember him after he passes, or will he know his soulmate for only a brief moment in eternity, watching them grow and flourish and age and die and be forced to spend the rest of his life alone again with only the memory of what once was to keep him company?

He does not know.

He looks through foreign letters and books sometimes in secret, wondering if perhaps he might find something familiar in their strange scripts. Much of the writing they find on heretics taken to be sacrificed to the dragons is confiscated by the priesthood so that they can try to see if the heretics are plotting anything against them. There are a few priests who can read the strange writing that he knows of, but he doesn't need their services. What the name on his wrist translates to is of little interest to him. He only needs to find out where it comes from.

His searches are in vain. There is no such script among their confiscated documents. He tries to tell himself he isn't disappointed.

He tries to tell himself it doesn't matter.

There are people who come to the temple for guidance, men and women and those who are both and neither, and on occasion he has seen faces as young as his made haggard with child after finding their soulmate and letting love override sense. He does not envy them, not their weariness nor their empty bellies nor their sleepless nights. He is not so far into his adulthood that he feels a need to leave behind a legacy of his life so that future generations will know of him, and he is not quite so far removed from the days of his own youth that he does not find the idea of spending countless hours and days associating with children utterly repugnant.

But he sees sometimes the gentle ways in which the lovers embrace each other, tender touches on the cheeks and shoulders, fingertips brushing together, hair swept out of the way, and his heart aches so deeply that he cannot breathe.

As he grows and his mastery of the dragon tongue expands, he seeks out the great gods that his spirit is kin to, to learn from his elders and better understand himself. Dragons do not have soulmates, he learns, and they regard the fact that he does with immeasurable curiosity. The children of Akatosh are cruelty and greed personified, with little care but for their own power, their own hunger, their own wealth. They have little need or desire for such things called love.

He cannot help but envy them.

When he is a young man, scarcely old enough to be growing whiskers, he arrives in Bromjunaar for the first time. He has learned all he can of the priests in Solstheim, and if he wants to continue his training he will need to head elsewhere. So he does.

The mountains in which the great capital city is built are colder and harsher than the mountains of his homeland. He had never known that ice could sting so bitterly, that the wind could be so thin that it takes him twice as many breaths to fill his lungs with half as much air, that the sky could be so heavy with snow that it falls down like rain, but so absent of moisture that even eating the snowflakes that fall from the sky dehydrates.

He has lived his whole life until this point within a day's distance of a coastline, and though the cold does not bother him, he was not prepared for what would follow it.

He spends many days in bed cursing the frailness of his mortal flesh before an amulet can be made to help him adjust to the change in climate, and then his training can begin.

His fellow acolytes have already forgotten his face by the time he is able to return to them. This does not bother him in the slightest. He came to Bromjunaar to learn, not to socialize.

However, their forgetfulness does provide an interesting opportunity.

It allows him to encounter those among the faithful who do not know anything about him, something that he has not been able to do for years. The acolytes know that there is a man in Solstheim who possesses the soul of a dragon, they might even know that that man's name is Miraak, and they might know that _his_ name is also Miraak—yet they do not see any reason why these two men should be the same.

It is... Refreshing, in a way. He does not have anything to prove to these people. They barely know him from the other acolytes that have come to study for the priesthood, and because of this they speak freely to him.

He learns so much more at Bromjunaar than he ever imagined he would.

The others all have Nord names, and they find it interesting that his is in the dragon's tongue. He is needled for his name once again while he studies at Bromjunaar, though the acolytes have more sense than the initiate that had spent a few months at his temple when he was a boy. Mostly they ask him if he was meant to be a teacher, or if his parents planned for him to join the priesthood, or if they even knew the meaning of his name at all when they gave it to him. He considers telling them the story, for though he has little memory of his parents and little love remaining for them he does not care for the suggestion that they were ignorant in naming him.

He considers it, but the thought of showing anyone the scar-white name on his wrist fills him with steadily increasing revulsion, and so ultimately he tells them nothing.

Despite his better efforts however, the revelation of his soulmate's name does come to Bromjunaar eventually.

When one of the acolytes first suggests abandoning their studies for the afternoon and heading to a bath house instead, it is on a frigid summer day in the mountains that the man insists is far too cold to be spent cooped away in the temple reading. He does not have fond memories of this acolyte; the man was always talking too loudly and blustering about his own importance, suggesting endless ways to shirk from his duties while still paradoxically aiming to become a great priest.

Normally he would be opposed to such idleness as what the acolyte was suggesting—all his years of extra work away from prying eyes had made him loathe to do much else—but he is more than caught up with his studies of the theories and rituals they will be expected to know, and it _is_ an exceptionally cold day to spend in the stone walls of the temple. He'd had to get up and pace the stiffness out of his bones more than once in the past hour alone. It would probably do him well to take a break, if only for one afternoon.

So he heads into a group of faces that he knows only in passing and joins them on their quest to find a bath house suitable for all their respective tastes. It is... Actually somewhat hilarious watching them try and fail to compromise.

There were plenty of bath houses in Bromjunaar, the great city being the capital of the world after all, and its people needing plenty of places with plenty of options and price ranges to tend to their needs—and every single member of the group that he had found himself a part of wanted to go to a different one.

One of the acolytes insisted there was nothing a man needed more than an herbal soak and a steam room to ease the chill in his bones, another wanted to see the great gymnasium one of the larger bath houses promised, two refused to go anywhere particularly pricey to enter but had wildly different ideas on what qualified as "particularly pricey", and the last of them made no effort whatsoever to hide that he just wanted to go somewhere that he would be able to see beautiful women in various states of undress.

He made a note to avoid that acolyte in the future. As well as every other acolyte in the group that made no move to refute the man.

Which was all of them.

Why had he agreed to come with them instead of just going out on his own, again?

Eventually the group managed to agree on a location (which he did admittedly hinder somewhat so that he could enjoy watching them bicker for just a little longer) and headed out into the middle of the city to complete their journey. The bath house was pleasant enough to be anticlimactic, almost; it was clean and not offensively perfumed, the provided exercise equipment was challenging but not obtuse to use correctly, and the water did a splendid job of easing the mountain chill out of him. For a few moments he could actually forget his troublesome company as his consciousness drifted away into the hot water baths.

Then someone was grabbing his arm and hauling his wrist up to view and he was unkindly reminded that there was a reason he preferred to stay on his own.

He hears them crow about regarding his name, wading through the waters to get a better look and asking him inane questions that they've clearly never considered whether or not he'd been asked them before. He feels someone's finger trace the looping curves of his soulmate's name and he loses it.

He pulls his arm away and emerges from the bath spitting forth rage in the dragon's tongue, a righteous delight coursing through him as he sees grown men shrink away in fear at the sight of fire licking from his lips. They know what he's saying. He knows they do. But from the look he sees in their eyes they had never once considered that the power that flows through the language of their gods might be turned against them one day, and they never once considered they would deserve it.

He takes his leave of the baths when a smattering of dust comes down from the ceiling, and he realizes that his rage had been shaking the foundations of the stone.

He does not look back at the acolytes as he goes.

They do not call out to him to return.

When he awakes the next morning and heads out to start the day he becomes dimly aware that the various priests in training among the temple have finally made the connection between the Miraak who bears a dragon's soul and the Miraak who studies among them.

Where once were pleasant conversations in the halls of the temple were now aborted whispers and hurried glances. Where once he would have droves of acolytes swarming around him for advice or studying tips there is only empty space. Where once there was camaraderie there was now only fear.

Fear of him. Fear of what he could do. Fear of what he had already done.

He would not be approached for another outing for the rest of his time at Bromjunaar. He would not be approached at all. The fear of divine retribution had a way of making one so scared of failing that they never tried to begin with.

He continues his studies in solitude and silence until his time at the temple comes to an end, and he tells himself that he does not miss the lively atmosphere. He should already be used to being alone by now anyways.

When he leaves Bromjunaar, it is to learn under a priest called Volahzid in a temple to the northwest.

He says empty goodbyes to the acolytes he had trained with in the capital, each apprentice priests in their own right ready to continue their training under a new teacher. There are some that weep as they part ways, some that promise to remain in contact despite the vast distance that is sure to separate them. None do so with him, obviously. He is not one of these soft-hearted fools. While his time in Bromjunaar was enjoyable for the most part, it is time for him to begin his life beyond its walls. There is no need for him to look back.

Volahzid is simultaneously exactly what he had always envisioned a priest to be, and not remotely anything like it. He has memories of the priests in Solstheim, blurred somewhat by time and lack of interest, but he does not remember them conducting themselves in the matter which his newest teacher does.

The dragon priest holds his services in the evenings before the people retreat to their homes for supper, directing his congregation to follow the guidelines the dragons have set out for them, to avoid the vices of men such as money and drink, and to know that to aid one's community is identical to aiding one's self. Then he taxes the villages surrounding his temple heavily, holds his evening services because he is almost always hungover in the mornings and afternoons, and seems to take great pleasure in breaking at least one of his own tenets every day.

The knowledge that he'll be giving orders to a god in mortal flesh, in fact, is something Volahzid takes perhaps the greatest pleasure in.

Watching the priest go about his "work", he finds himself thinking back to a young fool teasing a god in a temple by the coast, and he wonders how much trouble it would cause for him were he to simply kill the wayward dragon priest for his transgressions and take Volskygge temple and its surrounding villages for his own.

He does not do so in the end, but it is only because he's well aware he doesn't yet know how to manage such a large temple on his own.

He does not interact much with the temple aides and other apprentice priests. From what the aides have told him, Volahzid has been like this for years, and his subordinates either learn to accept such corruption in their midst, or request a transfer and leave. He asks when the last transfer was. The aide only smiles at him sadly, and returns to their duties without a word more.

He decides then that he will not follow the same path as those that came before him to learn at Volskygge.

For the most part he ignores Volahzid's instructions (chiefly because most of them are inane, heretical, or just plain impractical) and busies himself with learning the ins and outs of Volskygge's management. He speaks with the faithful who come to the temple to pray, offering them advice in practical manners and guidance in spiritual. He speaks with the smiths and suppliers who keep the temple maintained, learns what the bare minimum is to keep the temple functioning and what is advised to keep it from coming apart at the seams; it is both more and less than what he would have otherwise expected.

He learns the rites and rituals for preparing the dead to journey to the world beyond. He learns the proper way to fast so that his body doesn't destroy itself before it can become pure. He learns how to invoke the Words of Power that run through his soul for the betterment of those beneath him as a merciful god would (something that is perhaps more effective when he does it, for his Words carry more strength than even Volahzid's would). He learns that the dragons in this part of the country care very little about sacrifices in favor of entertainment or knowledge.

He learns that he absolutely cannot stand Volahzid.

So one night he takes stock of what he has learned so far during his time at Volskygge and decides to draft a letter. Three letters, in fact.

The first is a letter to the great priests of Bromjunaar who oversee the orders and assignments of the priesthood, detailing what he has seen at Volskygge and what he intends to do about it. The second is a letter to his home temple in Solstheim, requesting that they put in word to transfer him back to the peninsula. The third is a short request to be verbalized to the dragons around Volskygge, from one god to another, for their aid in clearing an infestation of corruption from the temple.

He warns the people that would have otherwise come to the temple that night, of course, before the dragons set it ablaze and feast upon the liar priest and his followers, because he sees no reason to punish them for something they had no means of knowing.

But he does not wait for a letter back from either set of priests before heading to Solstheim.

He's done ceding to the orders of lesser men for the time being.

When he returns to Solstheim, he needs to take a moment to convince himself that no, the craggy coastlines that he's known all his life didn't actually get smaller, he had only gotten larger and more aware of the world beyond his homeland.

It is strange all the same. He had been away for only a few years, and yet the land of his birth looks nearly alien to his eyes. Had he forgotten what it looked like in the time spent away? Had it forgotten him?

No matter. He is home now, and he does not plan to leave any time soon.

The road back to his homeland is a long one, and it will take him many days to get there. He has much time to think to himself as he walks.

What purpose does he have in this life, as an immortal dragon born in the shell of a mortal man? What plan does Akatosh have for him? Why send his soul to be born to lowly peasants and stolen by priests when great kings still walk the land bearing the banners of the faithful and could have easily noticed the signs of his divinity sooner, gotten him education and training quicker, made him more prideful and cruel like his winged brothers?

Why does he walk instead of fly, or listen instead of command?

Is he unique in this world, the only mortal to hold the soul of a god, or are there more, in other distant corners of the world waiting to be discovered, possibly already in service of some heretical force? What would it mean if there are?

Would his soulmate be one of—?

He stops dead in his tracks, both physically and metaphorically. It takes him some time to recollect himself and resume his walking.

His soulmate.

For all the years that he has been alive, the name on his wrist has never changed. He does not know what age his parents were when they bore him, but he knows he must be close to it by now. Were the scar-white name to blacken the next morning and his soulmate to enter the world, he would have no idea what to do with such knowledge. He is not the fool of a child he once was. He knows all too well now that not even a heretic can age years in a day.

It does not matter whether he is alone in the world or one of many.

He is alone no matter how many there are in the world like him.

He passes through a nameless village on his way back to the temple that had raised him. There is an old couple tending to their garden with faces that resemble his. They do not see him. He does not call out to make them see him. He keeps walking until the village is far behind him.

He does not want to know whether the resemblance is only a coincidence or not. He has already forgotten his parents once.

When a message finally reaches him from Bromjunaar, he has been spending perhaps three months living in the temple that raised him doing much of the same duties that he once did in Volskygge.

They're simpler now that he can just act on his own rather than concoct lies and excuses for why an apprentice priest was taking care of matters that the great dragon priest should have been doing himself. Technically the dragon priests should still be the ones doing these duties rather than an apprentice, but the priests of this temple have not held his respect since the day he heard their worries about his growing strength. Perhaps when he was a child they could have stood a chance at controlling him, but not as he is now.

He will do whatever he pleases in this temple and they will simply smile and let him.

And they _do_ let him. There are several new faces among the priests of his temple; many of them know him only by reputation, and they approach him with fear and reverence if they approach him at all. The open acknowledgement of his own superiority is a greater balm to the pains of his youth than he ever thought he would receive.

He goes to the outer walls of the temple when an aide informs him that a message has come from the capital, and it takes everything he has to prevent the surprise from showing openly on his face when he reaches the outer steps and sees what is waiting for him.

The message comes not in the form of a letter as he had expected, but in the form of another priest. Already, this would be wildly unusual as the apprentice priests like him have more important things to do than play courier to a wayward apprentice from Solstheim.

But this priest is high enough in the order to have earned a mask.

He has only met four priests in his entire life who wore masks: Keynthaarn, who had raised him in the temple before dying of old age; Togaatmaar, who had replaced Keynthaarn in the the years after his death; Volahzid, who did not deserve his—and the leader of the temple at Bromjunaar, who is always named Konahrik.

He does not recognize this priest, nor her mask, but he does not doubt that she is important.

He strolls down the steps of the temple at a languid pace, keeping his movements slow enough to be wary but brisk enough to be polite. The priest does not acknowledge him beyond the steadily receding incline of her head.

She hands him a package that he has only just noticed tucked away under her arm when he reaches the bottom of the steps, wrapped tightly in richly dyed cloth. He gives her a glance. She does not comment on the extravagance of the packaging.

So he does not comment either and simply begins unrolling the fabric. A vague shape takes form as the layers are peeled back one by one, one that confuses and irks him at the same time because he cannot tell what has been given to him nor why it is so heavy. He gives in to his frustration and Shouts a flame at the expensive fabric, inwardly delighted at how the silent priest steps back in fear at both the display of power and the now-burning package in his hands.

Flame licks at his fingers, but he does not care. He'd taken to wearing gloves shortly after returning in an attempt to avoid the scar-white name that has taunted him all his life. His hands are safe from the flames of his impatience. The wrapping comes away more quickly as it burns, anyways.

The last layer is torn away with neither fanfare nor flourish.

He stares at it. All he can do to his prize is stare.

Sitting in his hands is a mask, gleaming and golden.

When word had reached Bromjunaar about Volahzid, apparently, there had been something of a commotion about what was to be done in light of Volskygge being burned to little more than stone by the very gods it praised.

He does not know what was said during the resulting meetings. He doesn't even particularly care.

Because at the end of all the dithering and delaying and discussing, he was given a mask, and he was given a temple.

Apparently the faithful that supplied the priests with their power rather liked the idea that the god who walked among them had exacted quick and decisive punishment when one of the men whose duty it was to uphold the gods' will was found to be deeply lacking. So rather than excommunicating or executing him, he is inducted into the highest echelon of the order and given his own congregation to tend to. Perhaps he should set heretics on fire more often.

There are only so many temples on Solstheim due to the peninsula's relatively low population, so a new one will have to be built for him instead. He does not mind this. The dragon priests manning the other temples have done well to earn their positions, and he does not wish to take their followers from them. Not by force, at least; if he steals them away with the sense of his words and the strength of his conviction, then should it really be considered theft?

He walks to a slowly growing tent city in the middle of the peninsula where his temple is being built, and he gives his first sermon standing atop a crate of provisions to a group of tired workers. Perhaps half of them are listening to him. The other half are fighting to stay awake long enough to face the coming of a full day's work.

Somehow, he doesn't mind the insolence.

These are people who have come for _him_. The beginnings of his congregation. The beginnings of his people. He has seen healers and beggars and farmers among the growing tent city, workers and bakers and bankers and the occasional prostitute all seeking to cash in on the sudden gathering of people with money to spend and services to buy, and he is familiar enough with the history of the cities that had sprung up around Solstheim's other temples that he knows many of them will not want to simply pack up and leave when his temple has finished its construction.

He has seen the scar-white name upon his wrist so often that even now, having spent months hiding it away under gloves or cloth or strips of leather, he could trace its curves and loops perfectly on any surface given to him. All of his life the name has vexed him and cursed him, and now, in the wake of his temple rising into the sky stone by stone and beam by beam, he finds that he simply doesn't care about the name anymore.

He is not the little boy who ran into the crowd searching for his other half, nor is he the scrawny teenager who pored over foreign papers looking for a looping script, nor is he the young man who spat fire at those who dared to gawk at the mark on his skin.

He is a priest. He is a guide. He is a god in mortal flesh.

He has his studies. He has his duties. He has his people.

He is not alone.

With numbers of his faithful rising every day, he will never be alone again.

When he sinks into his bedroll at the end of a long day, waiting for the time when he can know the peace of a stone room and a wooden bed once again, he can almost convince himself that it's true.

When he first meets Vahlok, it is at the front steps of his temple to see the man that Bromjunaar has seen fit to assign him as an apprentice one year and one day after the temple's construction has been completed. There is an unsubtle delight in the young man's face as he looks upon his new master for the first time.

He cannot help but think of the last time he walked down the steps to greet a visitor from Bromjunaar, and notes with some satisfaction how the positions have changed since that meeting. Not to mention there is a particular sort of pride that swells up in him at the sight of his apprentice's starstruck gaze.

He finds he quite enjoys it.

He leads Vahlok to the attendants' quarters and explains the sum total of the apprentice's duties for the time being; what he will be expected to do every day, every week, every month, who he will be expected to work with and what his expected conduct is to be with the aides that serve them, the faithful that praise them, and the dragons that watch over them all.

He notices a blank stare when his explanation is finished and asks Vahlok if there is something that he'd missed. This was his first apprentice after all, and he'd not been an apprentice himself for nearly the usual amount of time it took for a priest to earn their mask and lead their own temple. It wouldn't be out of the question for him to forget something.

Vahlok shakes his head in response, and notes instead that he had not been expecting such a large share of a true dragon priest's duties so soon; his professors at the temple of Bromjunaar, apparently, had commented that he would likely be eased into the position rather than granted everything at once.

Ah.

He admits, perhaps somewhat embarrassed, that his own apprenticeship under Volahzid had been unconventional (at best) and his knowledge of what an apprentice's workload normally is was likely somewhat skewed as a result. At the same time, everything he listed was something that Vahlok would need to learn and become familiar with if he was going to be leading his own temple one day. He would see no issue with lightening the workload at first so as not to overwhelm the man, but ultimately his apprentice would end up performing all of these duties and more by the time Miraak deemed him ready to transfer to another temple.

He asks if Vahlok has any further questions.

Vahlok asks him if burning the temple down will be an eventual part of his duties.

He cuffs the man's shoulder in response—though there is a grin under his mask as he does so.

Work begins again as usual the next day, and he is pleasantly surprised to find his new apprentice doing everything he was assigned without complaint. Mistakes are made in the first few days, obviously, because Vahlok is new to the temple and new to these responsibilities, but he cannot help but feel that odd pride again that the apprentice would even try doing everything at once in the first place.

He leads Vahlok through the prayers and rituals, teaches him about the people who come to the temple for guidance, introduces him to the dragons that circle the skies in this particular part of Solstheim. It is genuinely hilarious to see the man recoil in terror when one of the dragons snaps at him in a mock lunge, and he joins his winged brothers in their laughter while Vahlok sulks for the rest of the day.

He debates telling his apprentice later when the dragons have flown off and they are returning to the temple's inner sanctum, that Vahlok's display of obvious fear has probably marked him as the gods' favored pranking victim, but decides that it will likely be funnier if the man has to figure it out for himself.

(He is correct.)

He forms a strangely easy camaraderie with Vahlok, aided by the fact that the apprentice priest is not that much younger than he is and possesses an easier insight into his moods because of this. Vahlok is fond of reminding him that they should really both be apprentices at this point in time considering their age and general experience, and he is fond of reminding Vahlok in turn that he is a god and Vahlok isn't so clearly concessions needed to be made.

On a cold day in Frostfall he joins the aides in building fires and drawing runes for the temple so that they might escape the coming winter chill. Though the temple's auditorium was open to the air for all to see him preaching, the inner sanctums were all underground to help give everyone who served the temple a better chance of surviving the winters of Solstheim's more mountainous regions. In the early autumn months they could get by with just the ambient heat of the earth rising up from the stone; come the true winter months however, frost would start seeping through the air vents, and the ambient heat would no longer be enough.

So, fires. It helped that the air vents also doubled as chimneys.

Vahlok had stumbled upon them stacking and chopping the wood together in the hours before the morning sermon, likely to give a report on something that had come to his attention and would need to be dealt with before the day had ended. It had taken perhaps three or four minutes of standing slack-jawed in the doorway for the apprentice priest to rediscover his mind and ask what exactly his master was doing.

(Specifically, the man argued that tending the fires was the initiates' job, which, yes it technically was, but he had never been one to leave work for someone else to do when he was already in a position to do it himself.)

He just says that there was work that needed doing, that he would be ready in time for the morning sermon, and that if Vahlok really had the time to stand there and do nothing, then he had the time to roll his sleeves up and help chop some wood.

And in response Vahlok rolls his eyes and rolls his sleeves and grabs an ax to do as his master had suggested. The man gives him his report in between tossing freshly chopped wood into the fires.

They pass perhaps fifteen minutes in relatively cozy silence before his keen sense of time alerts him that it was time to stop and prepare for the morning sermon. He rises from the fire and wipes the sweat from his brow, casually rolling down his sleeves and retrieving his gloves from another corner in the room. He turns to dismiss his apprentice and send him off to perform whatever other duties needed tending to.

But then something, or rather the lack of something, catches his eye.

Vahlok's wrist bears no name.

He cannot help but point it out, dumbly, for he was too young to hear the tale of his great uncle Zinvahriin before the priests took him from his family, and he has never once in his life encountered any being other than a dragon who did not carry the name of their soulmate with them. He did not know such a thing was possible.

Vahlok simply looks back at him, looks back at his wrist, and has the gall to say that oh, he forgot most people would find such a thing strange.

He wants to discuss the matter further, but the time is going by, and he still needs to give his sermon. He tells his apprentice to shelve the conversation for now, and find him after the service has ended.

Hours later, when his followers have returned to their homes and the fires they tended together are burning low, they have that conversation. He shows someone else the looping name that has marred his wrist for his entire life for the first time in years. Shares its story. Shares its history. Waits in trepidation for whatever response may come his way.

And Vahlok looks at the name, studies its strange characters and its damning color, and offers him the most sincere sympathies that he has ever heard.

When Vahlok returns to Bromjunaar for reassignment and he has been leading his congregation for three years and three days, on the fifth day of First Seed word reaches him of something lurking in the woods that the hunters cannot identify.

At first he thinks little of it. There are many creatures that walk the world, and men knew only a few of them. Even among those few, it was easy to mistake one thing for another. He advises them to be careful, to keep watch for things that could harm them in their daily lives, and to remember that he is always there to watch over them if they need him.

His people are all he has, after all. He would do anything for them. He initiates a curfew for those who would make their living in the woods, and commissions weapons from far away settlements who know war more frequently than his own does, and trusts that whatever is lurking in the woods of his home will not stay for long. His people will find it. His people will defeat it. He has taught them well, and his pride swells at all that they are and all that they have accomplished.

For a time after his measures are put into place, reports of the thing in the woods decrease.

Then people began to go missing, and he is too furious at the transgression to think about why they are only disappearing _now._

These were his people. These were _his_ people. He would be sooner damned than let himself stand idly by while external forces picked them off one by one, not when his own misguided actions lulled them into a false sense of security in the first place.

He runs to the woods to find the demon that has been terrorizing his people for so long. There is no sound in the woods, no animals or insects making noise in the trees and leaves and grass as he runs.

He does not realize until the demon is already upon him that perhaps there was a reason for the silence.

It is an enormous creature, easily the height and breadth of a dragon, covered in leaves and moss and bark. He does not realize until he sees it, large and shambling and shifting its moss-covered appendages around as though it wasn't used to humanoid shape, reeking of a deep metaphysical wrongness that he would surely be able to notice even if he weren't possessing of a god's soul, that this is not a mere demon.

This is the demon his people call the Woodland Man.

The demon advances towards him with undulating movements that only look _wrong_ to his eyes, legs bending in ways and places that they shouldn't, and it is on sheer terrified instinct that he draws his sword with one hand and readies destructive magic in the other when it comes too close for comfort.

The demon laughs at him.

You could not hope to overpower me with such tools, Miraak, the demon laughs. Its voice is reverberant and murky, like speaking through water. He cannot hide the way his body stiffens at the sound of his own name.

I did not come here to fight you, the demon says, undulating closer, bringing one enormous eye peeking through its covering of leaves and bark down to address him face to face. I did not bring harm to your followers, either.

A protective surge rushes through him and he demands to know what the demon has done with his people. The demon merely shifts.

Nothing at all, aside from move them somewhere more convenient, it says. In fact, I wouldn't have involved them at all if I didn't think it was the best way of drawing you out.

He grips his sword harder and curses himself inwardly at falling for what was obviously a trap now that the secret had been made known to him. He weighs his odds of wounding the creature enough to banish it back to Oblivion.

They're not good odds. He demands to know what the demon wants with him.

An answer.

Perhaps a trade, the demon suggests, brushing closely enough against him that he can smell the familiar tang of the sea hidden underneath the bark and the moss. There is a conundrum that has been vexing me for quite some time now, Miraak, one that I believe you're uniquely suited to answer, and I'd be more than happy to return your people to you if you could solve it for me.

He—

He hesitates.

Dealing with demons is never a good idea. Dealing with any sort of higher power is never a good idea, especially if you don't know the full terms of the deal.

But these are his people. His followers. They live under his rule and his protection, and he has sworn to do all he can for them.

They could never trust him again if he returned empty-handed.

Your answer doesn't have to come right _now_, the demon cuts in. This is a question that has been troubling me for decades; I can hardly expect someone who has only lived for a few scant years to figure it out right away.

His decision comes immediately.

He nods.

He nods, and the demon draws even closer to whisper its question into his ear.

_Why does a god serve its lesser brethren?_

And then it is gone, leaving him alone in the forest but for a sudden stream of missing villagers wandering in through the trees, and a sudden, overwhelming sense that he's made the wrong choice.

When he returns with his people in hand and the demon banished to wherever once it had roamed before, his faithful praise him endlessly and thank him for his guardianship over them. He is given gifts and sacrifices, invitations to join their families for meals, invitations to join their families through marriage, anything that he could want for in life is everything that they offer him in thanks.

Their gratitude almost overwhelms him at first. Then it simply begins to feel hollow against his chest.

He preaches his word in the following months on all that he has before walking into the woods that day, only now with the inclusion of being wary around creatures such as demons, to trust not in their honeyed words and bitter lies, and to not fall into such temptation that they might be drawn to you in the first place.

He does not mention that such a deal was how he had been able to perform the miracle they were praising him for. He tries his best to forget the question the Woodland Man had posed him.

He tries his best to move on with his life.

Still, as the nights change into days and the days change into nights, the question slowly weighs heavier and heavier on his soul. It haunts him in his dreams, bringing him discord and doubt and the smell of the sea hidden under pine needles and earth. He wakes more than once in the middle of the night, body slicked with sweat despite the cold, stale air of the temple, and he knows without knowing that the Woodland Man is growing impatient with him.

Always when he wakes it is with the terror of prey being chased by forces they could never hope to overpower. Always when he wakes his dreams pour out from his mind and leave him with nothing to explain his panic. Always when he wakes the question hangs in the back of his mind.

Why does a god serve its lesser brethren?

He does not know.

He does not _want_ to know.

(He cannot bear to never find out.)

He wakes up one night with not only sweat but sea water upon him, visions of strange creatures under the waves dancing across his sight in the darkness of his room, the scent of ink and parchment and magic lingering in the back of his throat, and heavy bruises across his limbs and chest as if he had been tossed about like a rag doll by some many-limbed monstrosity.

He stops sleeping after that.

When Vahlok returns to him, reassigned to another temple a day's walk from the peninsula but having taken leave to visit his old master, he can't help but imagine how he looks to his former apprentice now.

He has three apprentices now, instead of one: Ahzidal, Dukaan, Zahkriisos. By his estimate, this is not that unusual. He had been one of four apprentices to Volahzid. Apparently Bromjunaar had decided he did well enough with Vahlok to risk sending him more young minds to mold as he saw fit.

Their assistance is probably the only reason the temple is still running as smoothly as it always has.

He feels haggard in a way that he knows cannot be explained due to how much of his work now is being performed by his assistants. There is much about him now that cannot be explained, not without mentioning the Woodland Man, and he refuses to admit his defeat at the hands of the shambling demon. He cannot sleep, he finds his appetite lost from him, and the light of the sun grows increasingly harsh as he spends more and more of his time underground in the temple proper.

Some part of him, distantly, knows that he should not still be alive in this state. No man can live without sleep. No man can live without food. Perhaps his dragon soul is keeping him alive where his mortal flesh might otherwise falter?

He wouldn't know. He's never tried any of this before. He's never had any reason to.

He's grown crueler in his sleep-deprived state. Irritable. Impatient. His temple had held its first Dragon Feast scant weeks after he had arisen from his bed and never returned to it again, and the first shall be the first of many.

He had watched the heretics march to his temple and be devoured by the dragons waiting eagerly above, that day. He head heard their bones crack and seen their blood spill upon the stone, and somewhere in the back of his mind he had remembered a different Feast in a different village, with a different reason for watching the outlanders walking to their deaths.

He had gritted his teeth so tightly he tasted blood in his mouth, and when the dragons were satiated he had brought the remaining heretics deeper into the temple to be strung up in cages and burned for his own satisfaction. He had neither the sharp teeth or claws of his winged brothers nor the desire to consume the flesh of men, but this was the Dragon Feast and he was allowed to enjoy it however he pleased.

At least one of his apprentices had told Vahlok of that day, he knows, because he cannot think of any other reason why the man would be looking at him with such a mix of concern and disgust when once there was only a well-earned fondness.

He doesn't say anything about it himself, though. The temple must still be maintained and he has never been one to stand idly by when there is work to be done.

In the end, it takes all of three days for Vahlok to pull him aside and ask if he's ill.

It takes all of five days for him to say that he's perfectly fine.

It takes all of nine days for Vahlok to leave.

His former apprentice does not come back to visit again. Not for pleasure. He doesn't let the loss bother him, however; by now he's adeptly practiced at being alone.

When he finally figures out the riddle the demon had given him, everything starts coming undone.

He thinks of a child being taken from their family.

He thinks of a meeting held in secret between the priests.

He thinks of a youth being avoided like a leper in the halls of the temple.

He thinks of a priest who took delight in commanding his betters.

He thinks of the dragons who have watched over him his entire life.

He thinks: why does a god serve its lesser brethren?

_Because they wish to control him._

When the dragons come, he is ready.

His apprentices—his _former_ apprentices, now each priests in their own right—had taken time to turn around to his revelations, but they trusted their master and they knew what he spoke was true. He had spoken again with the Woodland Man after having his revelation, given the demon its promised answer and been given books of great power in return. He had devoured their contents and sent what was left to his conspirators for safekeeping.

He had went through his initiates and his associates and drew upon what he remembered from his time under Volahzid to systematically remove anyone that would oppose his new goals. He knows well who follows him out of a genuine desire to do well to their fellow man, who follows him for the proximity to power, who follows him for the simple paycheck of a temple worker.

He would have been left with perhaps a third of his total number of aides had the Woodland Man not appeared to him in another dream and offered him the Words with which to control lesser men. His forces grew instead of diminished, then, and they grew ever larger each morning when he set out to preach his word to the masses.

Then Vahlok had come.

Vahlok knew the initiates as well as he himself did and could tell nearly instantly that something was wrong with them. That something _he_ had done was wrong with them. The man had grabbed him by his robes and demanded to know what he had done, what he was planning to do, and why he had changed so drastically in so short a time.

They had been close once. They had trusted each other once. Where had that gone?

He had listened to his former apprentice's words with a face as blank as the mask he wore, and without a word more he had grabbed hold of Vahlok's arms and dragged him through the deeper recesses of the temple, far from the cozy halls that they had lived in together to the newer additions that had been built under the Woodland Man's guidance.

He had showed Vahlok the simulacrum made of his new master, with all his guises of the Scryer, the Woodland Man, the Old Antecedent, and the Gardener of Men removed to be displayed to the world as he truly was: Hermaeus Mora, the Daedric Prince of Knowledge.

He had told Vahlok of his encounter in the woods, of the bargain he had made, the torments he had suffered, the enlightenment he had received.

He had offered Vahlok a place by his side along with the others.

He had watched Vahlok storm off in a panic, calling him a traitor to all that could hear.

And now?

Now he stands on the steps of his temple, watching the dragons swarm around him in droves, and he Shouts.

The Words of Power flow through him, his dragon's soul lending strength to the tongue that he knows so well, and he can see in their eyes as they fly into his range of attack that if the dragons knew he could wield the Thu'um as they could, they did not know he possessed such mastery. The first kill is his, and the soul that he claims in triumph only adds to his strength.

He is one man against a rapidly expanding army, but he is still just as much of a god as they are.

He meets them in battle head on.

He dodges strikes of claws and swipes of tails, counters Shouts of fire, Shouts of ice, Shouts of whirlwinds threatening to carry him off into the sky with his own effortlessly. He has a sword in one hand and a sizable collection of spells in the other, and between his mortal weapons and his immortal Voice he is more than a match for any single dragon that would attack him.

Which is why the single dragons who thought they could kill him on their own are the first to fall.

Every dragon soul that he takes fills him with renewed energy. He relishes their power, even if picking off the easy targets first will only allow their craftier brothers to learn from his actions and devise more challenging ways of destroying him.

A crackle of flame whizzes inches past his head only by the sheer virtue of having to roll out of the way of an oncoming blast of ice shards from one of the serpentine dragons that favor the skies above Solstheim. He turns to direct a lightning bolt at the unfortunate fool who dared to attack him and then—

And then there is Vahlok, standing across from him on the field of battle, bold and unmoving underneath a sky full of dragons. Vahlok, who could never truly hope to match him in a fight, who knew it as well as he did, and who clutched his staff in defiance all the same.

Vahlok, who offers him one last chance of abandoning his plans and seeking aid for whatever madness has surely overtaken him.

As if he would accept. This is not madness that flows through him now.

This is control.

He rushes at the man with sword in hand and a snarl in his throat, all too ready to destroy the one he once called a friend. His sword gouges chunks of Vahlok's staff with each deflected blow and his grin is feral at the fear so apparent in the man's eyes. He Shouts the man away at point blank, charging lightning in his off hand, already aiming for where Vahlok will land on the scorching ground.

All around them the dragons swarm, cracking the earth beneath their feet as the full force of their breath hitting the ground in myriad near-misses or intentional feints wreak havoc on the very bedrock of Solstheim. A sudden shift in the ground beneath him knocks him off balance, sends his bolt of lighting careening off in a wildly different direction. One of the dragons takes advantage of his momentary imbalance, strikes at him with its claws, rends the flesh of his arm in jagged rows. He bites back the cry of pain burbling in his throat, turning it into a Shout of fire and death.

Sharp winds buffet him from the sides. The dragons swarming above were wasting no time in striking while he was distracted. They come at him all at once, too swiftly for him to maneuver around everything, too completely for him to simply become ethereal and wait out the barrage of flames and frost. He can feel his skin burning. A whipping tail connects with the wide of his chest, breaking the skin open on contact, only for the wound to be near-instantly cauterized by a stream of flame from another dragon flying overhead.

He strikes out with his sword and the blade finds purchase in an elder dragon's neck. The beast's infuriated surprise grants him all the time he needs to drive his sword in deeper and end its life, a last gurgling roar attempting to escape even as the dragon's flesh already burns into tatters. He feasts upon its soul desperately, willing the dragon's vitality into his body as soon as possible to replenish what his wounds had taken from him.

And explosion of fire lands directly against his back, knocking the breath out of him and sending him tumbling to the split earth. It takes him far too long to turn back with blood pooling in his mouth and venom in his glare, searching for the one who had dared to strike him.

There.

There wavers Vahlok, rising to the ground on unsteady feet. Blood pours from a wound on the man's head, and from the way his arm twists around, the bone must be shattered. Yet still he holds his staff high. Still, he charges one final fireball.

For all the time that his apprentice has been training and studying, Vahlok had never managed to earn his mask—and it is for this reason only that at such a distance he can see tears springing from the man's eyes as Vahlok readies one final spell to slay his wayward master with. The mass of fire growing in Vahlok's hands is easily powerful enough to kill him should he let it connect.

So he does not let it connect. He scrambles to his feet and charges out of the way. He reaches into his soul for the Words of Power. He _Shouts—_

_He Shouts and—_

And then he sees nothing.

When he awakes in Apocrypha, dried seawater caking his robes, strange creatures under black pools dancing around at the edge of his vision, the scent of ink and parchment and magic choking the air around him as heavy bruises cover his limbs and chest from the battle, he screams.

When he is so old that he no longer has any means of identifying his true age anymore, he finds a small object that has no business being as world-shattering as it is.

It's a book. Of course it's a book, there is little that exists in Apocrypha aside from books and paraphernalia related to inscribing books, but this one in particular catches his eye almost immediately. It is small, and bright, and brightly colored, and it is covered in looping characters that he has only seen once before, thousands of times before.

He knows before he does anything else that it's a perfect match. He knows likes he knows his own soul. But some desperate, irrational part of him needs the confirmation.

He tears the leather glove off of his arm and holds the scar-white name upon his wrist next to the book's colorful title.

The shape of the characters inscribed are identical.

He tears the book open to find the printing date. He needs to know. _He needs to know._ He does not know what the letters inside say, but he's familiar with the numbers. Those, at least, had not changed much with the passage of time.

3E 145, the book's inner cover displayed proudly. He freezes.

"3E." The "Third Era" by these people's calendar.

His own time had been "ME." He could piece that together by comparing this script to earlier ones from the same Empire that he had encountered before. He did not know what the "M" stood for, but he knew what it meant in the roughest terms.

"ME." One of the two Eras before the First. The Eras before their calendar even started.

He can feel his breath quickening.

He did not know how long the Eras lasted. He could not read this script, could barely read the script that had preceded it, but he knew from finding other books left by these people that the First Era had ended with the date "1E 2920."

Three thousand years.

Was the Second Era much the same? Had this book been printed more than six thousand years after his imprisonment?

He—

He had always assumed that his entrapment by the demon had been the consequence of his own foolishness. The price he paid for his pride. He had always assumed that he was meant for greater things than what Hermaeus Mora had tricked him into, and that the demon had simply stolen his fate from him as was the demon's wont to do.

He was a god. He was a priest. He was a dutiful man. He was the Allegiance-Guide. He could still remember that story, buried deep within his heart where he found it easier to pretend nothing was there at all.

Standing there, in the halls of Apocrypha, staring blankly at the name that had haunted him all his life, he realized that it had all been a lie.

No man could live for three eras and expect to be able to live a meaningful life with his soulmate. Not even him. Not even a dragon.

His fate had not been stolen from him.

His fate had always been to be trapped here.

Everything around him is colored in various shades of green and black—

But for the first time in millennia he sees red.

When he awakes, it is a groggy and slow endeavor that has him grasping at his memories like a child might grasp at falling sand. He is dizzy. Swimming. Dazed.

He brings a hand to his temple in hopes of easing the pounding inside of his head that surely threatens to tear his skull apart. His eyes catch something pale and mottled in the corner of his vision and a sudden horrible comprehension slams into him with a greater force that any blow he has ever taken in his life when he realizes what he's looking at.

He remembers now.

A madness had overtaken him. Apocryhpa is filled with books and all things related thereof, and so he knew there must be bookbinding knives somewhere.

He had gone out in search of one. Found one. Set it to the scar-white name with its horrible twists and horrible fate and carved it free from his flesh.

He had seen its white letters stain red. He had seen the skin of his arm do much the same. He had seen his vision go black. He—

He had bled out.

He had died.

And then he had woken up.

He stares at the pale flesh of his own arm held trembling before him. There was no stain. There was no scar. The name rested against his skin in the same position it always had, with no indication that it had ever left him at all.

He hears a voice resounding overhead as if from a man speaking through water, and everything inside of him stiffens. Up above him, the Prince of Knowledge laughs.

Hermaeus Mora calls out to him. Did you forget, the prince says. A dragon can die many times over, but only another dragon can extinguish their soul forever.

I am the master of this domain, the prince says. I control everything that happens within this realm. You may die as many times as you like, but your soul will never pass on without another dragon here to claim it, and I can force it back into your body as many times as I wish.

You can never escape me here, Miraak.

He is left with those words as the demon leaves him again. For an incalculable moment, he simply stays where he is (where he fell where he died where he resurrected), but a slowly expanding web of red along the engraved floor catches his eye.

Blood. When did—?

Ah.

He had been clenching his fists so tightly that his fingernails had broken through the skin on his ungloved hand.

He stares at the bloody palm. Stares, then directs some healing magic into his hand, then goes to retrieve his glove.

Perhaps he cannot die here. But he refuses to simply lie down and give up.

When he thought that he had earned his place in Apocrypha for his own foolish pride, a lifetime ago, a few hours ago, he had not placed more than idle contemplation on the thought of escape.

Clearly that needs to change.

When he begins planning his escape in earnest, he has absolutely no illusions that Hermaeus Mora is not aware of his intentions. He has been a fool all his life, he knows that now, but in this instance he knows far too much.

Hermaeus Mora has as many hands as he has eyes, and he has an infinite supply of either. Nothing that happens in the Prince's domain happens beyond his awareness. Hardly anything that happens outside of the Prince's domain happens beyond his awareness either.

Not that the location matters much; he can hardly expect to hide knowledge from the Prince of it.

But what he plans doesn't require subterfuge. He could tell Hermaeus Mora right now that he plans to escape Apocrypha one day and return to the land of his birth if he wanted to. What he plans requires _insurance_. It is all well and good to return to Mundus and taste the salt-sea air of his home, but being able to do so means nothing if he cannot ensure that he will not simply be pulled back to Apocrypha as soon as the Prince decides to take him back.

He needs to find a means with which to escape Apocrypha—and he needs to find a power that will force Hermaeus Mora to _let him_.

For perhaps the first time in his abnormally long life, he is glad that the world he finds himself trapped in contains all the knowledge of the universe.

He sets off in a random direction and once again begins his journey to harness a higher power.

After an unknown amount of studying however, he realizes quite readily that no power in the universe can lead to his successful escape if he doesn't have forces outside of Apocrypha that can help him with his calibrations. Aurbis is an infinitely large reality; the last thing he wants is to escape Apocrypha and find that he has landed himself in the Void, or the realm of another Prince.

He's not entirely sure which of the two options is more reprehensible.

He finds more than a few people wandering Apocrypha, either seeking an audience from Hermaeus Mora or trying to steal the Prince's knowledge from underneath his infinite eyes.

The dragons were a surprise. He bent them to his will easily, and demanded of them everything they knew.

They had been trying to escape the eradication of their race. Apparently his actions had caused war to break out between the mortal men of Skyrim and the dragons (and dragon priests) that oppressed them—and the dragons were not winning. Paarthurnax had betrayed Alduin and taught the secrets of the Thu'um to mortal men, something that filled him with equal parts glee and rage. Glee, because such a betrayal would surely infuriate the priesthood. Rage, because the Thu'um was _his_, and he alone of all men should have the right to wield it.

That was not the end of their information, however. Apparently the dragon priests had seen fit to erase his lineage after his "death" in the weeks leading up to the war (which filled him with a feral pride to know that others took up arms against the dragons in his stead) in the hopes of preventing their rebellious followers from rallying around him as a symbol. His temple was destroyed with what remained condemned to be reclaimed by the wilds, his name was stricken from their records, and anyone that uttered even a mention of his life or his accomplishments would be killed. The only one who still had a connection to him was Vahlok, who had been appointed as a watchman on the now _island_ of Solstheim should he ever return.

He didn't know whether to be offended that they would deny him his recognition so completely or flattered that they would expend so much effort to do so.

He settled for annoyed that his plans would now be that much harder to carry out.

The dragons, it seems, could fly between the planes of reality, their wings and their divinity granting them easy access to all avenues of their father's creation. Just once, merely to test the theory, he attempted to fly out of Apocrypha on the back of one of his new servants, wondering if perhaps Hermaeus Mora would overlook such a simple escape plan when there were so many other methods that he might look into.

He had no such luck. Whatever pathways through the Void that had taken Relonikiv, Sahrotaar, and Kruziikrel to Apocrypha were mysteriously closed whenever he decided to join them.

Oh well. It was no great loss.

Still, the ability to traverse the planes of Aurbis were a valuable aid to his plans. He sent the dragons forth to Mundus to act as his own eyes and ears, and occasionally, his messengers.

It was going to take time to build up a network of followers to aid him in his escape.

Luckily for him, time was something he had in plenty.

When his studies become too inane and his plans of escape become too frustrating, he takes to diving into the ink-black waves of Apocrypha and letting himself drown in their depths.

The time between his death and his inevitable revitalization by Hermaeus Mora has an odd way of bringing everything back into focus.

The dragons needed to be reminded of their place under him frequently, Sahrotaar most frequently of the three of them, and the point between when his domination over their will was just starting to wane enough for them to question his orders and had finally grown so weak as to break struck him as a colossal waste of time. He had already proved himself the greater god out of all three of his comrades in Apocrypha; the fact that he had to waste time reinforcing this fact instead of furthering his plans of escape frustrated him more than words alone could communicate.

His messengers were doubting his word, and it was getting more and more troublesome to convince them. He would have to find some means of appealing to their nature that didn't involve currying favors and granting information. A cult of personality perhaps?

Perhaps. It wouldn't be hard; he's already a god, after all. He'll have to think more on it later when he stops fantasizing about purging the lot of them and starting anew elsewhere.

He strips from his robes in preparation for the dive, prior experience teaching him that though whatever stains muddying his flesh upon death will be cleared away when he revives, stains muddying his clothing are a different matter entirely. The brisk air of Apocrypha raises bumps across his flesh as the layers of wool and metal and gold peel back one by one and get set aside on an alcove full of books.

He takes one last look at this particular corner of the great library to commit its features to memory (just in case he revives somewhere else and has to hunt down his clothing later, as had happened more than once before) and jumps off of the tessellated platform into the black waters below.

The burn in his lungs as the water swallowed him did wonders for clarifying his thoughts before the blackness took him entirely.

He awakes later on the same platform, not even bothering to move as his body adjusts to being alive again. There's still the dizziness and nausea from the first time he'd learned that death was not permanent for him in this world, and he knows better now than to try and fight it just so he can get up and move quicker. He lays perfectly still on the tessellated ground, focusing on the feel of his own breathing, the wire underneath his body, the water dripping from his hair, the air on his skin.

Some part of him distantly wonders if perhaps it's not the dying the frees his mind, but the stopping to remain still and direct his attention inwards rather than outwards. It would certainly spare him a lot of pain the next time he needed to recollect himself.

He gives himself a few more minutes to simply _be_ then opens his eyes and sets to work removing the rest of the black water from his person before redonning his robes. He doesn't know why the water clings to him when his own blood had not. Perhaps it was some quirk of whatever process Hermaeus Mora used to revive him. He'll likely never receive a true answer.

The water clings to him stubbornly, finding a home for itself in the curls of his hair and the valleys of his skin. He reaches for whatever books are closest and tears out their parchment to sop up the moisture with, uncaring about for whatever information he's erasing with the knowledge that there is probably another copy of this exact same book somewhere else on Apocrypha already. When his legs are dry he reaches for his trousers and socks, when his torso is dry he reaches for his undershirt.

The water on his arm is being particularly stubborn, and he goes through many pages trying to remove the last of the black stain before he realizes something.

What he's trying to scrub away isn't ink-black water still clinging to his arm.

What he's trying to scrub away was the ink-black name that marked the birth of his soul's other half.

When the reality of what he's looking at finally sinks in, it takes nearly every ounce of control that his body possesses not to scream to the heavens.

He throws himself into his plans with more hope and desperation than he has ever experienced before or since.

His soulmate has been born. He is almost giddy with the implications. Fate had seen fit to trap him in Apocrypha so that he might survive long enough to encounter them. Now that they lived and breathed the sweet air of Nirn, his final years in Apocrpyha were numbered.

Fate would not keep him in Apocrypha to never meet his soulmate until his dying day. Even the gods had limits to their cruelty.

He pores over books and scrolls and maps and instruments of all sorts that he would have never known how to use if he did not have centuries of time to do nothing but decipher them. He strives to increase the loyalty of his followers. Before, he sought out only those souls with a desire for power above their station and the craftiness needed to look outside of normal means to get it. Now he looks as well for those with nothing to lose, those whose lives could only be improved by joining his network of accomplices, who might not be quite so dedicated to him but would be devastated if they ever lost their new support network.

He plays fast and loose with his recruiting efforts, tells them enough of truth and lies to make them worship him as the people of Solstheim once did all those ages ago. Perhaps in another life he might have been more cautious, but now there is a finite window to his escape, and his damnation in Apocrypha will be nothing in comparison if he misses that window. He has them keep their noses to the ground looking for anything that might prove useful on Nirn while he continues scouring the tomes of Apocrypha.

The day Kruziikrel returns to him bearing news of the landstones that have been erected all over Solstheim in the years since his imprisonment, he feels more like a god than he has since he stepped out of his temple for the last time.

His followers would receive new orders the day immediately after.

When he meets his soulmate for the first time, he does not know it.

He knows time has passed, twenty years at the least, but the exact number evades him. He has been in Apocrypha for far too long. Time has little meaning. Records have no use. The realm of the Prince of Knowledge contains multitudes from the past, the present, and the future. If he were to stumble upon a book written thousands of years from the moment he picked it up, how would he ever be able to know?

They come to him through a portal he knows to come from a Black Book, and he has them restrained before they even realize where they are. There are many who have sought Hermaeus Mora's Black Books, but for someone to find this particular tome is troublesome.

This particular tome was the one that rested within his temple, and had been guarded by his followers. For someone to reach it means that his temple has been breached and his followers are dead.

He should kill them. He _would_ kill them, but the moment he steps closer he hears the thrumming of their soul against their skin and knows the same way he knows himself that it is too big for their body to contain.

He had been the first. But he is not the only. The stranger before him is Dragonborn, and the pride in his voice is genuine as he greets a member of his own kin. More genuine still, to hear the drum of their soul and know that he is not imagining the impetuous roar of Alduin echoing across its expanse. He remembers Nords from the south coming to him in the time after he forsake his waking dream, knowing that only a god could kill another god and hoping that perhaps he could slay the greatest of their pantheon.

He had considered it then, but denied the request. Killing Alduin would have done little to enact the change he so desired. Another dragon would have simply risen up in Alduin's place at the top of the hierarchy; what he craved was to bring it all toppling down.

Still. Pride or not, that does not change the fact that this Dragonborn is meddling in his affairs, and he has never been one to tolerate such a thing.

He sends them back to Solstheim with a promise. The island will be his. Its people are already his. And while he withers in Apocrypha now, his time in such a prison grows shorter by the day. He will return to Mundus. He will return to Nirn. He will return to Solstheim.

And when he meets this Dragonborn again, if they interfere with his efforts to track down his soulmate as they have interfered with his efforts to escape Apocrypha, he _will_ kill them.

When he feels his connection to Mundus slipping, and looks through the eyes of his dragons to see that the landstones of Solstheim no longer thrum so completely with his energy, he realizes suddenly why this Dragonborn has appeared on Solstheim, and how they got their hands on his Black Book.

His followers had reported a few of their number receiving visions from him of an impostor claiming to be the one true Dragonborn, and that they must kill such a being for daring to be so insolent. He tells them that he never sent such dreams, never knew such a being walked the fields of Skyrim, and never even _cared_ because his power is such that even the one who slayed Alduin could never hope to defeat him in combat, much less prevent his rightful dominion over the land.

He did not care if another Dragonborn dared to live at the same time he did. But he knew all too well the kind of being that would want another dragon bound and determined to kill him.

Hermaeus Mora has finally begun to act against his plans, which can only mean the Prince of Knowledge knows that he is finally growing closer to succeeding in his escape.

He has allies among the Prince's forces. He binds increasingly stronger minions to the landstones, sets them to escape into Nirn when his energy no longer courses through the stone. It will not be enough to repel the Dragonborn, not when he's sure that they believe stopping his return to be paramount with stopping Alduin's. But if he can wound them, if he can delay them, then perhaps it might be enough to grant him the time he needs to reclaim the stones he's lost and gather the energy he needs to speak with them and reveal to them the true cause behind their actions.

He has no such luck. He can feel it keenly, like a piece of his soul being ripped from his body when the first stone is purified of his essence.

He can't accept it. Refuses to accept it. Decades of planning all being undone in the span of mere weeks by a lone Dragonborn with misguided ideas about the part they play in this story. He's gained an enemy of his own kind, and he doesn't even know their _name_.

He doesn't. Or at least he thinks he doesn't.

It is only later, when mounting frustration with his plans crumbling around him drives him to dive beneath the black waters again that he peels back the glove on his hand, sees with a mounting horror that the ink-black name upon his skin has turned a gleaming gold, and realizes that no, he _does_.

When he meets them for the second time, third time, fourth time, fifth time, so on, seeing them in front of him close enough to touch yet far enough only to see fills him with an aching that he cannot put into words.

He had thought fate was cruel enough in denying him that which fate itself had promised him for so long. Now he knows the depths that it is willing to go, to not only deny him his soulmate but to make enemies of them both.

He cannot help but wonder if perhaps the gods knew what he would do to their fellows during his lifetime, and sought to punish him preemptively for it.

It vexes him, this aching. His heart begs to see them and hold them and know them but the moment that he is able to slip his spirit through the cracks in Apocrypha and snag another glimpse of them along with a fallen dragon's soul the aching only increases in intensity. He had told himself he started these brief escapes only for the power they afforded him, for the strength lost from Solstheim's landstones that could be ever so slightly made up for with the strength of a dragon's soul.

He cannot lie to himself about them now. Though he might need what strength the souls offer him, it is the ability to see that which fate had kept from him so long that keeps him coming back. It's almost funny, actually. He had thought that meeting with his soulmate might provide him with some relief for the pains of an eternity existing without them. Now he finds his pain has only just begun.

Perhaps most vexing, he finds that he cannot help but enjoy it.

His power grows with every dragon soul he claims, with every day that passes where his followers make further progress infusing Solstheim's landstones with his magic once again, yet still he can only afford to send his soul through short jaunts into Mundus in sparse intervals. He is not worried about discovery, not when he knows that Hermaeus Mora already knows his plans, not when the demon is already taking such blatant steps to unravel them, but he fears getting too comfortable in his imminent escape and making a critical error in the process.

And... Perhaps he fears getting too attached.

They do not talk to him when he appears. Not really. For a time he wondered if they could talk at all, and spent hours pondering how one could Shout without being able to speak, but in his eighth encounter with his soulmate they swore ferociously when his spirit appeared behind them. He realizes then that their silence is derived from spite, not lack of ability.

They do not believe him when he speaks.

He has tried, obviously. Every time he appears to them he tries to convince them of the true consequences their actions will bring forth.

He tells them where the cultists who came to kill them truly got their orders from. He tells them why his master would want his escape attempts foiled. He tells them what he believes Hermaeus Mora stands to gain by pitting the two of them against each other.

He tells them they they are two halves of a fated pair, and shows them the golden name hiding beneath his leather glove, and that is the only thing he ever says that gives them pause. For a brief moment, he is able to see them reaching for their own glove, their own wrist, to check the name upon it that surely must bear his runes in gleaming gold.

But his power wanes, and he is forced back to Apocrypha before he can see what outcome his actions have earned him.

The landstones continue to fall. Portions of his soul are shorn from him with each stone that is cleansed of his essence, and he wants to believe that the fact that there is a greater distance in time between each shearing means that his soulmate is not quite so deaf to his words as they might like to act. That perhaps he's broken through to them and they're planning something underneath Hermaeus Mora's proverbial nose.

He wants to hope. But he's too old now to think that hope will get him anywhere. Until the Dragonborn confirms his suspicions, he'll continue his plans as if nothing has changed.

It's all he can do.

When he sees them at the Summit of Apocrypha, riding on the back of Sahrotaar through what can only be the power of the very same Shout that Hermaeus Mora once taught him all those ages ago, he cannot shake the bone-deep certainty that this is the last time he will ever see his soulmate.

He's read of such tragedies before in the infinite library that has served as his home for the past four Eras. Fictional, most of them. But not all. Soulmates torn apart by the whims of the Daedric Princes, soulmates who had lost each other to outside tragedy, soulmates forced to bring about each other's end.

He has no doubts as to what the Prince of Knowledge has lured them here for. One of them is going to die here. The other will never leave without the Prince's approval.

If he dies here, the Dragonborn shall consume his soul as all dragons do, and Hermaeus Mora will gain a new champion who already knows the price of his disapproval. If his soulmate dies here, their soul will be his instead—and though the power such a soul would grant him could easily allow him to escape Apocrypha, he has no use for a world where nothing awaits him but the agony of having once had the opportunity to be whole, and now never again.

No matter what happens, Hermaeus Mora will win.

Such is the cruelty of fate, and the Prince who governs its pathways.

It's almost funny, now that he has time to simply stand back and reflect on his life, watching Sahrotaar grow ever closer. His name meant nothing in the end. He has guided nothing. He formed an allegiance with nothing.

He is nothing. Not anymore.

He draws his sword and walks closer to where the Dragonborn is directing Sahrotaar to land. He calls out to his soulmate one last time. He removes his mask and throws it to the ground with a clatter. At this distance now, he can see the expression on their face as they look down at his for the first time.

He treasures the sight. He offers them a hand as they disembark from Sahrotaar, and they accept it warily.

Perhaps his soulmate has found a way to outwit Hermaeus Mora.

Perhaps they have not.

Perhaps one or both of them will die here.

Perhaps they will not.

Perhaps in battle, they shall have their first and only dance.

And perhaps, for the first time in his life, if only for a few fleeting moments, he will know what it is like to not feel alone.

**Author's Note:**

> it's half-past midnight and i've been writing for five hours
> 
> i'm tired
> 
> EDIT: MORE THAN A WEEK LATER I REALIZE I MISSPELLED THE FUCKING TITLE


End file.
